City’s Residents Forge Ties in New Zealand

LOS ALAMITOS —  They’re thousands of miles away, but the citizens of a little city in New Zealand are becoming as close as next-door neighbors to some residents of Los Alamitos.

Through the efforts over the last two years of a loosely organized committee, the city of Los Alamitos has forged sister-city ties with Cambridge, New Zealand, a rural community of roughly 12,000 people.

Volunteers and schoolchildren have built friendships with Cambridge citizens by writing letters and exchanging photographs. The project has not cost the city any money and no official visits have been organized.

“I correspond with Nancy Davies (head of the Cambridge sister-city program) far more frequently than I do with my relatives in the Midwest,” said Leo Greene, former president of the Los Alamitos sister-city committee.

While Davies provides Greene with interesting stories about life in Cambridge, where cattle and sheep raising are key industries, Greene gave a shocked Davies a detailed account of the recent Los Angeles riots.

Two months ago, when Davies’ 23-year-old son visited Los Alamitos, local residents jumped at the chance to entertain him, Greene said.

And at Los Alamitos Elementary School, first-graders recently compiled a book of photographs and autobiographical descriptions that they sent to New Zealand. It so delighted Cambridge residents that Davies said the local newspaper wrote about it.

“Your wonderful ‘From the USA’ book did the rounds of town yesterday and everybody was so excited when they read it,” Davies wrote in a recent letter to Los Alamitos schoolteacher Wyona Pattie.

The schoolchildren hope to exchange videotapes in the future to get an even more vivid idea of their differing lifestyles, said Lorene Gonia, assistant superintendent at Los Alamitos Unified School District.

The sister-city relationship was first suggested by a Los Alamitos resident who visited Cambridge and noted the two cities’ similarity in size. Horses that race at nearby Los Alamitos Race Track have also been trained in Cambridge, according to Los Alamitos Councilwoman Alice Jempsa.

The goal of the Los Alamitos-Cambridge relationship is not to promote business and trade as some larger Orange County cities have sought with their sister cities, Jempsa said. Los Alamitos volunteers are more interested in informal visits and exchanges for friendly, cultural reasons, she said.

“We hope to continue this on more of a people-to-people basis,” Jempsa said. “We hope we can keep the schools involved, because that builds a stronger relationship. We stuck with it because we felt we could bring something to the children, particularly.”